


light burns off in the distance

by herax



Category: Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order (Video Game)
Genre: Cal Kestis Needs a Hug, Flashbacks, Gen, Hallucinations, Hurt Cal Kestis, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:40:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23269333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/herax/pseuds/herax
Summary: Cal is badly injured in an accident on Bracca but rescue doesn’t come as quick as he’d hoped.
Relationships: Cal Kestis & Jaro Tapal, Cal Kestis & Prauf
Comments: 15
Kudos: 228





	light burns off in the distance

**Author's Note:**

> This started out based on that line of dialogue about scrap rats at the start of the game but took a turn into 3.5k of experimental angst, idk. Cal just needs a hug. :(

It’s a bad fall.

Cal’s had enough of them during his time on Bracca to know the difference but when he looks down at the unnatural angle of his leg, he starts to think this might be the worst one yet.

“Prauf?”

The shout comes out as a garbled cough, and Cal spits out a mouthful of his own blood before he remembers that Prauf isn’t even here today. His head feels foggy, like someone hit it with a pipe, and he squints at his surroundings as he tries desperately to remember the name of the scrappers he was working with that morning. 

“G-Grolen? Sida?” 

He coughs again but groans when the movement makes his ribs ache. Not traditionally a good sign. 

“Can- Can anyone hear me?”

The sound doesn’t travel as far as he hoped, and he peers up at the metal beams criss-crossing above him. There’s light high above, although he can’t tell whether it’s a flashlight or whether he’s been out long enough that the sun has already risen. 

The pain is his leg is almost enough to make him black out again when he drags himself up to a sitting position. He clicks his own flashlight on to assess the damage and immediately regrets it when he sees the sickening bulge of broken bone pushing against his skin. There’s enough blood pooling beneath the surface that his calf is already an ugly purple and Cal grits his teeth against the pain as he checks over the rest of his body.

The frayed support line is still attached to his harness but the number of rips in his uniform give a good indication of just how many pieces of jagged metal tore through him on his way down. The cause of the fall is hazy — he remembers the sharp screech of metal and the shouts of other people around him as they all tried to slow their descent, but he can’t remember if it was a machine fault or individual error.

He’d been unlucky with his fall, winding up deep in the bowels of the ship they were scrapping, and Cal takes deep breaths to stave off the rising panic as he tests his range of movement. 

If he had to guess, he’d say three of his fingers are broken along with at least one of his ribs, and the wounds on his thigh and shoulder bleed sluggishly as he tries to pull himself to a better vantage point. 

“Hello?” he calls again, and winces when fresh blood runs down his chin from a gash across his lip. 

He holds his poncho to the cut and grimaces at the coppery taste in the back of his throat as he tilts his head up and shouts, “Can anybody hear me? I- I fell — I need a medic! Anyone?”

His head throbs and he squeezes his eyes shut with a wince as the sound of his voice echoes in the empty ship. There’s no response from above and Cal tries to ignore the feeling of despair as he looks around for any way to get out.

While his leg is a lost cause, his arms are still mostly functional, and he’s thankful for his experience as a rigger when he drops to his elbows and begins to crawl across to the rusted grating on the other side of the pit he finds himself in. The movement jars his leg, making nausea rise in his throat, and Cal rests his forehead against the cold metal floor for a second as he fights to keep it down. 

“It’s just a climb,” he tells himself. “Just high enough for one of the droids to find you. Nothing too hard.”

It’s not his most convincing argument but it’s enough to get him over to the grating. He curls his fingers in the metal, trying to ignore the way the slats merge and gape in front of his eyes, and he takes a deep breath before starting to haul himself upward.

He passes out before his feet can even leave the ground.

———

Cal wakes to the smell of burning.

The scrapped ship is gone, replaced by the walls of a small house. He thinks they were blue once, dotted at eye level with painted stars, but all that’s left is the orange crackle of fire. His lungs burn when he coughs, his eyes watering from the sting of smoke, and he curls up even smaller amid the destroyed furniture when he hears the sounds of fighting in the next room.

He can barely remember the voices. 

He knows the two women are important, knows they mean safety and home and love, but when the voices become screams, he presses his hands over his ears and tries even harder to forget. 

The fire draws closer, catching on the fabric of a toy, and Cal cries harder as he watches the face of the stuffed wookiee melt under the heat of it, until only two black eyes stare back at him from beneath smoldering fur. 

He doesn’t want to be there anymore. He wants all the heat to go away, and he wants the screaming to stop, and he wants his wookiee back. 

The ceiling caves in, piling more kindling on top of the fire, and Cal cries out as he raises his hands, a desperate attempt at self-defence against the encroaching flames. He watches through tears as the twists of the flames slow into a swaying dance but he blinks when he sees a bright burst of blue light in the doorway.

There are more screams, the voices deeper this time, but they’re accompanied by a strange buzzing noise that Cal doesn’t recognise. The blue light swoops and flashes but then vanishes, and Cal hides his face behind his knees when a strange man appears through the smoke.

He shouts to someone but Cal only hears a few words above the roar of the fire.

“-kid here!”

“-slowed? How-”

“-sensitive maybe? I don’t know; just help me get him out!”

His lungs hurt, his nose and throat stinging hard enough to make him cough again, and just as the man with the blue light starts to make his way towards him, Cal’s world fades from orange to black.

———

It’s dark the next time Cal wakes up.

For a moment he thinks he’s dreaming again but he’s soon brought back to reality by the stabbing pain in his leg. It’s swollen badly enough that even if Cal was able to use his arms normally, he doesn’t think he’d be able to crawl more than a few feet without help. 

His head pounds, the ache of the injury mixing with the telltale pulse of dehydration, and his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth as he calls out again.

“Help! If anyone can hear me, I need help!”

His voice is even rougher than before, the words scraping their way out of his parched throat, and he clutches his bruised ribs as he coughs. No blood comes up this time, which is a relief as far as punctured lungs go, but he looks down with a frown when he feels something brush against his foot. 

He can’t help the startled yell that escapes him when he sees two scrap rats perched by his ankle, their beady eyes glinting in the darkness. 

Cal kicks out with his good leg, sending them skittering back into the warrens of the ship, and he shudders when he looks down to see that they’ve chewed through his boots and socks, leaving tiny scratches of teeth and claws on the side of his foot. 

He shines the light around, trying to ward off any visits from other rats, but as he looks back up at the darkness above him, all he can hear is the scampering of feet in the metal around him.

His stomach growls with hunger and he pushes himself back further against the wall. The flashlight is a reassuring weight in his hand, even when it falls on the growing blood stains on his uniform, and Cal sweeps the beam of it back and forth across the small pit as he fights to stay conscious.

“Just stay awake,” he says out loud, as if that makes it more official. “Prauf will be back at work soon. He’ll know I’m missing. He’ll get the medics to find me.”

The squeaking of the scrap rats sounds like chattering laughter, bouncing off the walls around him and burrowing under his skin. 

Cal shivers as he grips the flashlight even tigher and tries not to think about how quickly the rats have been known to gnaw through bone.

———

A low, insistent beep greets Cal when he wakes up the next time.

He doesn’t recognise his surroundings — the room is small and dark and smells of metal — but he knows even without looking that the beeping is not a good sound. There’s something wrapped around his wrist which clinks when he tries to stand up, and Cal looks down to see the dirty sleeve of his Padawan robe and the cuff binding his wrist to a pipe.

Distantly, his memory fills in some of the blanks: the convoy to meet up with Master Tapal; the ambush by separatist troops; and then the big hands snatching him up and carrying him away. 

A red light blinks at him from across the room, the intermittent glow falling on the corpse of a clone, and Cal pulls back with a frightened whimper. He tugs on the cuff without success and peers through the darkness to try to get a better look at whatever the red light is attached to.

His eyes widen when he sees the small timer mounted on the wall.

He yanks on the cuff again with all his might but aside from the metal digging into his skin deep enough to draw blood, the restraint doesn’t budge. Trying to control the surge of panic, he reaches out to the force and pulls at the pipe holding him to the wall with everything he has.

“Padawan?”

Cal jumps at the sound of his master’s voice from his comm unit. Annoyed at his own stupidity for not trying to contact his master sooner, he scrambles to answer. 

“Master Tapal!”

“Padawan, where are you?” Tapal’s voice is stern and demanding. “The clones took some losses but the rest of the troops have returned.”

His fear of the ticking bomb is briefly eclipsed by shame at having disappointed his master yet again, and he tries to sound as grown-up as he can when he stammers, “We were attacked by separatists, Master. They took me; I- I don’t know where I am.”

“What do you mean you don’t know where you are?” Tapal asks, anger melding with concern. “Make your way outside and tell me what you can see.”

Cal bites his lip in embarrassment. “I- I can’t, Master. They tied me up and they- there’s a bomb here.”

He feels the ripple of worry through the force. “A bomb?”

Cal nods, trying to force himself to focus on anything except the steady beep and the slow tick of the timer. “I think they wanted to distract you,” he says, lowering his head. It’s bad enough that he’s allowed himself to be a liability to his master but having to admit it is painful. “I don’t know why else they would bring me here and allow me to keep my comm device.”

“This bomb, is there a timer? How long do you have?”

Cal swallows hard. “26 minutes, Master.”

The line cuts off for a moment and Cal knows Master Tapal is cursing. 

It’s back a second later but his master’s voice is tense when he says, “Padawan, listen to me. I need you to tell me everything you remember. Your location when you were attacked, anything the separatists said. Tell me everything you can see in the room with you.”

Cal nods and starts to talk. He hears the whistle of wind over his comm as Master Tapal leaves whatever shelter he’s found, but he focuses on the details of his hazy memory rather than the tears pricking at his eyes. 

The room feels smaller with every passing second, the walls pressing in and the timer looming large in front of him, and he huddles back against the pipe as he finishes describing the room. 

Master Tapal makes a noise of acknowledgement and Cal stares at the body of the clone on the floor as he swallows past the lump in his throat.

“Master, I’m sorry,” he whispers. “You should stay with the clones. The separatists probably wanted you away from the base so that they could mount an attack.”

“And leave you to die?”

The timer on the bomb drops below 15 minutes and Cal hopes his master can’t hear his quiet sniffle as he says, “You said the war should be our focus. That it’s important to keep Bracca out of the hands of the separatists.” Tears spill down his cheeks and he wipes them away furiously with his free hand. “You told me duty comes first. I- This would be an unnecessary risk. You should-”

“I’m the one making the decisions here, Padawan,” Master Tapal says bluntly. “It is not your place to tell me what I should or should not do.”

Cal nods, blinking away more tears. “Yes, Master. I’m s-sorry, Master.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he says. “Just do better next time.” There’s another whistle of wind and fresh determination in his master’s voice when he says, “I’ve identified your location; I’ll be there soon.”

The comm goes silent and Cal presses his lips together as he nods again. The beep-flash-tick of the bomb is incessant, inching closer to his death, and as Cal sees the timer slip to ten minutes, then nine, then eight, the tiny room begins to feel more and more like a tomb.

The timer soon starts to plummet faster.

Cal panicks, pulling on the cuff again, but even with his strongest force-pull, he can’t dislodge the pipe from the wall as the beeps turn into one long, shrill blare. Minutes go by in seconds, the light on the wall now a steady scarlet, and Cal can’t keep from activating his comm again.

“Master, please hurry!”

The body of the clone stays sprawled on the floor, its armor riddled with blaster holes and glowing crimson in the light from the bomb. 

The timer keeps dropping, down from minutes into seconds, but when Master Tapal answers, there’s no urgency in his voice. Just disappointment.

“You were right.”

Dozens of seconds go by in a heartbeat and Cal sobs as he yanks at the cuff on his wrist. “Master-”

“Farewell, Padawan,” Master Tapal says, as the final seconds of the timer tick away. “You’ve been an unnecessary risk for long enough.”

Cal jerks awake as the bomb explodes.

He’s panting, fear still coursing through him, and he clamps a hand over his mouth to muffle the sound that threatens to escape. 

The dream’s a lie — he knows Master Tapal was there in time to rescue him — but as he comes back to himself, Cal honestly can’t remember how much of what his master said was real or what was his imagination.

The words themselves are all true, of course — saving him was an unnecessary risk that did ultimately get his master killed, albeit years later rather than on that day — and guilt digs its claws in deep once again as he buries his face in his hands. 

The rats scuttle past him, whiskers brushing his broken leg and long snouts nosing at his clothes, but this time they just seem to laugh and crowd closer when Cal tries to shoo them away.

———

Cal knows he’s dying.

He’s been down there too long to expect a rescue. Things slip through the cracks on Bracca all the time, literally in his case, and even if Prauf notices he’s gone and convinces the foreman to send out a search party, Cal isn’t sure he’ll last that long.

Honestly, he almost wishes the end would hurry up and arrive. 

He loses track of time, and place, and even his own body. The scrap rats scurry over him, hungry teeth tearing at his clothes and flesh in equal measure, but Cal can’t tell whether he’s still here in the pit or whether he’s a kid again, crawling under juddering machinery to remove blockages while the rats nip at his ears and fingers.

The radiating agony in his leg is a broken bone one second and the weight of a boot the next, an Imperial general sneering down at him for not showing the proper respect to the Empire, and he finds his ribs bruised and broken from a beating behind a cantina rather than from a collision with metal beams.

His brief periods of consciousness are preoccupied with pain and hunger and thirst, but when the bodies start to appear in front of him, Cal isn’t sure whether he’s dreaming or just hallucinating. 

He can still see the rats, the gnawing, squeaking, laughing rats, but they crawl over the other bodies too, tearing into the charred corpses from the burning house and the dead clone still lit red by the bomb. 

Master Tapal’s body stares up at him from the floor of the escape pod, eyes hollow and accusing, and Cal lets out a terrified cry when that empty gaze suddenly locks onto Cal’s own.

Master Tapal’s body jerks, the holes from the blaster bolts still smoking as he drags himself across the ground towards him. The rats part to let him through, squealing in delirious glee, and Cal cowers back helplessly. 

His master’s lips move, dead flesh somehow shaping words, but all that comes from his throat is a low rattle as his hand closes around Cal’s calf.

Cal yells in fear, trying to push himself backward against the wall, but he can barely hold himself upright as Master Tapal looms over him. He smells of fuel and fire, of the burning wreckage of the escape pod that served as his pyre, and Cal shakes his head as his master reaches down to grasp his face. “No, no, please-”

“Cal!”

The voice that comes from his master’s mouth is sharp and urgent, and Cal flinches when a broad hand meets his cheek. The touch is warm, not hot like a fire or cold like a corpse, and when Cal blinks, the image of Master Tapal fades into the familiar face of an abednedo.

“Prauf?”

The word is barely audible but when a small, worried smile crosses Prauf’s face, Cal can’t keep from crying. 

“Yeah, it’s me,” the thing that looks like Prauf says but when Cal buries his head against his shoulder, the person in front of him doesn’t disappear. 

He doesn’t know if this is death or a rescue but he embraces it either way, his body shivering with hiccuping sobs as he clings to the person before him. It’s stupid and weak and embarrassing and if he wasn’t half-certain he was already dead, he would try to control himself but as it is, he can’t do anything but keep hold of the newcomer.

The noise of the rats fades, replaced instead by a low murmur, and Cal opens his eyes when he starts to recognise the words spoken in Prauf’s gentle voice.

“-right here, kid. It’s okay. We’re going to get you out.”

The reassurance almost makes him cry again but he steels himself, wiping at his face as he pulls back from the hug. His hand comes away bloody and he sees the concern on Prauf’s face as he wipes a fresh trickle of blood from the cut on Cal’s lip.

“You with me, kid?”

Even the tiny nod makes Cal’s head spin and he rests back against the wall as Prauf fiddles with some kind of harness that dangles from above them. It’s too easy to close his eyes but Prauf squeezes his shoulder before he can fall asleep again.

“Hey, Cal, stay with me,” Prauf says. “We got medics waiting for you up top. Just hang in there.”

Cal blinks sleepily. “How long-”

“Nearly three days,” Prauf says. “There were a lot of injuries when the support gave way, and some idiot accidentally marked you down as walking wounded. No-one even knew you were missing until yesterday.”

Cal winces when he hooks the harness in place but cries out when the first tension on the line sends fresh pain sparking through his leg. He bites his lip, tasting the blood from the cut, and tries to pull in a deep enough breath to stop himself from passing out.

“That’s it,” Prauf says. “Good job, man. Keep breathing.”

“I- I fell,” Cal stammers. “I couldn’t get out.” It seems important that Prauf knows everything and Cal reaches out to him as he says, “I- I tried to climb, I swear. I shouted and flashed my light but the rats and the dreams and-”

“You did well, kid,” Prauf says, soft and sincere, and Cal feels like something in his chest is crumbling when he looks up at him. 

“I saw-”

“Shhh,” Prauf says, firmer this time. “You survived, all right? We can save the recap for when you’re not burning up.”

The rope attached to the harness pulls tight and Cal tenses in pain as he feels himself hoisted up off the ground. Prauf is there next to him, keeping him steady, and as the light glares high above him, Cal grips the front of Prauf’s uniform and says desperately, “I- I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

The glare gets brighter, the world fading out around the edges, and when Cal blinks, Master Tapal is the one looking back at him. 

The words that leave his master’s lips in response are a lie but as the light overtakes him, it’s a lie Cal is happy to believe. 

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”


End file.
